Stories from anyone’s mind

The cold was stifling my ability to think, to wake, or to dream. I lay there, wrapped in a cocoon of duvets and blankets- I had all the necessary luxuries in life that one could need for comfort and survival. One of the lucky ones, out of the world, as a whole.

But still, I lay there, shimmering in my own unblanchable flesh, feeling chilled through to the bone. Cold was something i’d gotten used to then, a constant state in which I had to endure or forget. Functioning like a ghost, you crack on.

I remember a point: walking back from one place in town to another, with an old friend. We were talking, I think the conversation was trivial and non too demanding, but interesting. Enough for me to mentally curse the hands of mine, which had gone beyond numb, to physically exhausting in their ice. They were distracting me from the conversation, which was a low moment for me, because it was the first undeniable evidence, that at functioning, I was failing. Failing to even hold a conversation, trapped by the price i’d had to pay for commanding and distorting my own body.

I’d become too emotionally attached to the artwork I was trying to create. The point at which the artist becomes the victim of their own insatiable will to manipulate imagery and colour, in order to spill out of themselves, a never ending flow of constant change, and perceives it as ‘progress’. There comes a point, at which every painter has to make the decision that the final piece is indeed final, and it is time to soak the bristles. Hang up the apron, stand back and let the landscape be.

I was stuck in the mud of my own addiction to crafting. I’d actually stopped painting, drawing, singing and making, in the external sense. All of it came to a halt, when I embarked upon the new project of internal consequence; depriving and diluting my body, in an effort to sculpt it into a new shape, a shape of shocking contour, freakish distortion, and many many edges. There could never be too many edges. I got lost in my own little ‘treasure hunt’, to find more jutting edges, new lumps, new angles and their contrasts to bone.

It was, upon reflection, an abstract mission, kindled by surrealist yearnings, which necessitated the adoption of a kind of minimalism, in order to find solace through expressionism.